Week three of classes--already knocked down by a cold

At least I hope it's just a cold. I've been coughing a lot the last day or two, so I don't know if it's getting worse or turning the corner. Just started taking Robitussin, though that hasn't helped much yet. I had to teach via Zoom today and might need to again tomorrow. I'm not a big fan of running a large class through Zoom, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The students seem interested and involved, though, which is good. 

I'm enjoying the rhetoric class so far, though sometimes our conversation takes odd turns. Today we were talking about Lloyd Bitzer's foundational article, "The Rhetorical Situation," and a student's question ended up leading me to reflect on the "intentional fallacy" and the New Critical approach to literary criticism that I was (at least partly) educated in. I have since tended to take a more rhetorical approach to reading literature, though. (I remember when I was presenting about Vern Sneider and A Pail of Oysters on a panel about East Asia in Anglophone fiction--I looked over at the copy of my paper that one of my co-panelists had printed out and saw that she had written in the margin, "Intentional fallacy?" Was that her response to my whole paper?)

These disconnected recollections are brought to you by my cough syrup. More later...

Social media quandaries

In the week or so leading up to the beginning of the fall semester, I've cut back a lot on my use of LinkedIn, which is my only remaining active social media account after I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts (the latter a couple of times!) and stopped using my Bluesky account. (I'm not counting YouTube, LINE, or this account.) I deleted the LI app from my phone and logged out of LI on my computers (though admittedly, I've "checked" it once or twice since initially doing that).

This morning when I got up, I thought about whether I should just delete the LinkedIn entirely. As with all of the social media accounts I've had, I find that I have learned a lot from LI about events going on that I'm interested in, people's publications and presentations that are often relevant to my interests, information that is useful that I probably wouldn't think of searching for, etc. So when I think of deleting it, the FOMO is real. 

On the other hand, I've (mostly) gotten along OK without Facebook and Twitter and the other platforms since I left them, Admittedly, I do end up on the "public" side of FB once in a while when I'm searching for something, and when I was in Taiwan this past summer, I was talking to someone about my Ts'ai T'iech-ch'eng research and he recommended contacting a number of sources who only seem to be available through FB. (This leads to my second quandary that I've had since that conversation: should I or shouldn't I rejoin Facebook--just to contact these people or organizations? Knowing me, it seems like a slippery slope.) 

I guess for now I'll keep the LI account but just not visit it--too busy, anyway. It might end up going the way of my Bluesky account, which I think is still there if I could remember how to log into it. Or I might eventually pull the plug on it entirely, and join the un-social-mediated (or whatever you'd call it). I see the results are mixed, but from this sample, most people are positive about the change. If anyone reading this has tried disconnecting, let me know your thoughts!

Our Kerr biography has a (tentative) title!

Found out the other day that one of the titles in the running for the GHK biography has been approved by the sponsor of the book, the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs. The tentative title is  《葛超智傳記：亞洲、冷戰與一段未竟之志》 (roughly, George H. Kerr: Asia, the Cold War, and an Unfulfilled Ambition), and it should be coming out early next year. It's co-authored by Professors 蘇瑤崇 (Su Yao-tsung), 泉水英計 (Hidekazu Sensui), 吉原ゆかり (Yukari Yoshihara), and me. More details when I know more!

New school year's resolutions?

I was going to write up my resolutions for the new academic year as I've done in the past, but I noticed that last year I didn't really make any resolutions besides the idea (or fantasy) of getting more sleep. Maybe I should have specified that I should do that sleeping at night rather than taking long naps in the middle of the day.

I also came across this article from Jessi Gold, a wellness officer and professor of psychiatry. She suggests, among other things, that you should "consider words or values" instead of resolutions. This way you're not making specific but impossible-to-keep resolutions like "read a book a week" or something like that but rather suggesting "an intention."

So I'm going to go with a word or value for this year that I'd like to keep in mind. One of the things that I got from rereading my dissertation in preparation for the Shansi roundtable this past summer was the reminder about how enthusiastic the Shansi Reps were in the classroom. I think that with a few exceptions, it has been more difficult for me lately to maintain (or even start with) enthusiasm when I'm teaching. Whether it's just regular burnout or a combination of that, the current political and institutional climates, and the rise of GenAI, it's harder for me to look forward to the new academic year with a positive outlook. And if I'm not enthusiastic, how can I expect students to be enthusiastic? 

So I'm going to try to keep the word "enthusiasm" in mind this academic year. 

Four new books in the former native speaker's library

I got a collection of four small illustrated books about old Taichung, 《臺中舊城》, which includes 

• 「宮原武熊的一天」(about Miyahara Takekuma, a Japanese ophthalmologist who ran an eye clinic in Taichung),  
• 「和平日報：二七部隊」(about the Taichung-based newspaper I've been combing through for my research on 蔡鐵城),
• 「臺中公園-前世今生」(about Taichung Park), and 
• 「1960's 綠川點點滴滴的日子」(about the cleaning up of the Lü Chuan [Green River] in downtown Taichung).

These books also have maps of old Taichung that I guess you can use to find the places discussed. Wish I had time this trip to visit Taichung and take a look at those historical sites.

 

From their website, 臺中舊城生活博物館, it appears that they've published other books about Taichung, too. 

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Writing from Taipei now. It is miserably hot and humid, but I walked (walked!) the 1.1 km (OK, I'm a wimp to complain!) to 唐山書店 (and now I see that they have a website and I could have just ordered from it...). I bought one book I had planned to get and another that I discovered there.

呂東熹，《二二八記者劫》，玉山社，2016.

This book has a chapter about the Ho-p'ing Jih-pao (和平日報) newspaper that Ts'ai T'ieh-ch'eng wrote for before 228. Part of that chapter is about Ts'ai himself; I've already read it online, but I want to read the rest of the chapter (and the whole book) for context about journalists and newspapers during that period. 

徐秀慧，《戰後初期（1945-1949）台灣的文化場域與文學思潮》，稻鄉出版社，2007.

The title interested me, and I saw some footnotes mentioned the 和平日報, so I decided to buy it.

Still have some more books to buy in the coming weeks. Gotta pace myself... 

New ebook in the former native speaker's library

Just downloaded Evan Dawley's new book Taiwan: A People's History to my phone (the print copy isn't available yet). Hopefully, I'll be able to read it on my flight to Taiwan (tomorrow!). I'm looking forward to it.

Here's an interview with Dawley about the book:

Revisiting my dissertation

As I have mentioned a couple of times, I'm going to be participating in a roundtable on the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association in China and Taiwan. I got an email early this morning that suggested that we are supposed to submit our presentation materials by July 5, which was a bit of a surprise. But I happened to have time today to do some work on it. So I woke up and got going on it. 

The actual presentation (which I haven't done much of even now!) is only supposed to be five minutes long, but I also want to be ready for the roundtable discussion. We have worked up some questions that we'll discuss, so I spent the day going through them and drafting some responses. Doing that required me to read through parts of my dissertation and some of my dissertation notes from 15+ years ago. Some people have told me that they're horrified when they try to reread their dissertations, but I don't feel that way. Oh, there are some cringey places in it, and I've found more typos than I care to think about, but generally reading through it is a pleasurable experience. (As I told my brother, I think it's because my dissertation is so full of quotations of people who are smarter than I am!) 

Reading the dissertation also brings back memories of the process of writing it, which was also (generally speaking) enjoyable. I have heard people talk about how their dissertation process was painful, and I'm sure there were painful aspects to mine, but I actually enjoyed reading and studying the archival documents, interviewing former Shansi reps, and putting it all together.* It wasn't all roses and cheese (to borrow my 11-year-old's phrase--don't ask me what it means!), but maybe because I took so long to write it (9+ years), I had time to "live" with the documents and the interviews and use them to sort of create a virtual Oberlin Shansi world in my mind. Rereading my dissertation brings all of the experience back to mind. It also allows me to make connections between what I knew then and what I have learned since then about Taiwan and about US-Taiwan relations through my work on George Kerr. I think the continued learning and making these connections is something that keeps me alive and keeps my few remaining brain cells working!

*Though it got a little scary when I started having dreams about Nicolas Cage helping me with it...